Sit back and look at our Viennese friend Matthias Hombauer's jolly nice photos of the three days he spent with us as we belted across his home country, leaving approximately two thousand people fractionally more deaf and hopefully entertained.

Returning to Britain, I joined another band and hey presto, two of the members were Swedish. Perplexingly we never got round to playing a gig in their home country, but we did manage to all go to a wedding in Stockholm which is the first and only time I've ever seen a wedding cake being thrown across a dancefloor. It ended up, quite literally, in the best man's face.

Plans for Fink's production rehearsals are plunged into a skipful of turds by one of those professional rehearsal spaces turning round at the eleventh hour and calmly announcing that they don't allow use of a smoke machine. Panic! Fink's entire live show is based around a smoke machine. I'm personally lost if I can actually see the rest of my band through lack of fog.

He recoils with a faintly amused expression on his face, shrugs, then glances around for an appropriate piece of hardware with which to impale me. He seizes a nearby spare mic stand, and so begins a Tom and Jerry style chase around the backstage area, me leaping over flight cases and knocking guitars to the floor in my efforts to escape... My tour bus dreams are getting stranger.

Last night saw the announcement of the nominees for this year's AIM Independent Music Awards, and as I watched our presenters reveal the labels and artists that feature in this year's nominees list, I felt great pride that I get to work with the people responsible for some of the best music in the world.

There is one situation in which an encore is definitely not such a good idea. Frowned upon, in fact, by just about everyone in the venue apart from the audience cheering for it. And that situation is a festival. For a festival to be a success, it must run on time.

This summer, Fink - as well as releasing a new album, preparing for an American/European tour and generally planning other modest things like global domination - will be spending a sizeable portion of time playing festivals. You know about festivals.

This has been said before, in many different ways, languages and levels of exasperation, but I'll reiterate: Mumbai is fucking crazy. Twelve and a half million people living on an island less than half the size of London.

Apologies to anyone who came to see us in New York, Chicago or any of the Canadian shows, but LA stormed in as our best gig of the tour. The room was big and packed, the sound was thumping and we played an absolute corker, even if I say so myself.

Since starting to work on the AIM Independent Music Awards a couple of years ago, it hasn't escaped my attention that every time a list of music award nominees is published, a large-scale debate and healthy amount of criticism and cynicism inevitably follows. I suspect this is because of the subjective nature of music; the concept of judging it is arguably flawed.